AIDS Anniversary: Remarkable progress seen in 30 years — but ‘victory’ is elusive

The Post-Standard/Jim Commentucci CASUALTIES: Panels from the AIDS quilt were on display at the Southwest Community Center in Syracuse last De´cember during World AIDS Day.

The 30-year battle against Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome — AIDS — is a remarkable chapter in the history of medicine, science and cultural education. This anniversary also marks the end of three decades of a human tragedy that crosses the boundaries of geography, race, age, gender and sexual orientation.

While the specter of what once seemed an unstoppable pandemic has faded, this is no time to pop the champagne corks. Young people, particularly minorities, are still getting infected by HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Many of them don’t even know it. HIV continues to spread in the developing world, where prevention education and medical resources are limited.

The perception that the AIDS crisis is “over” makes the education/prevention task harder. Young people, seduced by online social networks, seem to be resuming risky behavior. In Onondaga County, 41 new HIV cases were diagnosed among the 24-and-under age group in recent years. Meanwhile, the relentless pressure of other needs could start to drain the hard-won funds that are saving lives and could yet lead to a vaccine and tame HIV for good.

How different the world looks today from the early 1980s, when doctors and researchers confronted the terrifying anomaly of healthy young men in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York City dying from rare cancers and virulent pneumonia. Was there an infectious agent? If so, how was it transmitted? How to treat it? Shocking pictures circulated of young gay men, emaciated, covered with lesions. Some called it God’s judgment on homosexual promiscuity.

But even as gay activists led the fight, it grew clear this was not just a “gay disease.” Injection drug-users, hemophiliacs and others who depend on blood transfusions were at risk. Heterosexuals began showing symptoms. Babies contracted the infection from their mothers.

By the mid-1980s, scientists had isolated HIV and linked it to AIDS. The first reliable HIV test came in 1985, but it took two more years for the FDA to license the first promising anti-AIDS medication, AZT. Its benefits were limited, however, and it would be years until the first retrovirals began slowing the progress of the virus. By then, the scourge was global, exacting genocidal tolls on nations in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere.

Today, many of the estimated 1 million Americans living with HIV — up to 1,000 of them in Onondaga County — use a combination of anti-HIV drugs to live full lives, and look forward to a normal lifespan. Over the past decade, government and private initiatives have extended treatment to 11 million people with HIV in the developing world. Continuing care, prevention efforts and testing reach millions more. Babies are born virus-free to infected mothers — in the United States and abroad.

But at least 60 million people have contracted HIV, of which as many as half are dead. Of 2.6 million people infected in 2009, 1.8 million have died, most of them in the developing world. On this noteworthy anniversary, there is much to celebrate. But there is much more work to do. This is no time for complacency.